Collaborative editing applications allow multiple users to access and edit a document. There are two conventional approaches to collaboration on documents. The first approach uses an application to manage requests to edit a document by checking a document in and out of shared storage, permitting only one user at a time to edit the document.
The second conventional collaborative approach has the master document's owner create a unique copy of that document for each collaborator. Because the collaborators are denied knowledge of others' edits, their respective work quickly results in conflicting changes to the master document. The master document's owner is left with resolving these conflicts. What was to be collaboration diverges into a conflict of edits.